A preferred form of projection lenses for wide screen television is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,348,081 and 4,300,817, as well as copending U.S. application Ser. No. 280,785, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,526,442, assigned to the assignee of the present application. The lenses disclosed in the aforementioned patents and application generally comprise three lens units: from the image end a first lens unit of relatively small optical power; a second lens unit which supplies substantially all the positve power of the lens; and a third negative lens unit having a strong concave surface towards the image end of the lens, serving as a field flattener, and essentially correcting the Petzval curvature of the first and second lens units. The lenses, as disclosed, are designed for use with a cathode ray tube.
The lenses of U.S. Pat. No. 4,300,817, disclosing a single biconvex element in the second lens unit, all have an equivalent focal length (EFL) of about one hundred fourteen millimeters or greater, while the lenses of U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,081, which utilize a two-element lens unit including a biconvex element, may have a reduced EFL. The lenses described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,526,442 are designed to have a fold in the optical axis between the first and second lens units and have been designed so that the EFL is as low as one hundred fourteen millimeters. These EFL's are for cathode ray tube screens having a display surface with an approximate five inch diagonal.
Projection TV sets are rather bulky and require high volume cabinets. One manner of reducing the cabinet size is to decrease the EFL of the projection lenses, thus increasing the angular coverage of the lens.
A further consideration is introduced wherein a spacing is provided between the screen of the CRT and the third lens unit of the projection lens. This spacing may be required for the inclusion of a liquid cooling material and a window necessary to enclose the coolant against the face of the CRT. This additional spacing between the face of the CRT causes the third negative element to contribute more negative power, which must be compensated by increased power in the positive second lens unit. An effect of increasing the angular coverage of the lens as a result of decreasing the EFL, is that the aberrations become more difficult to correct. A single biconvex element second lens unit, as shown in the aforementioned patents, does not provide the lens designer adequate degrees of freedom to correct for the resulting astigmatism and distortion. By dividing the optical power of the second lens unit, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,081, the EFL may be shortened. However, merely splitting the optical power of the second lens unit into two elements to obtain additional degrees of design freedom, does not provide acceptable contrast and resolution where the angular coverage of the projection lenses is required to be in excess of twenty-seven degrees semi-field.
Improvements in projection television systems require both reduced cost and smaller volume of the cabinet for rear screen projection systems. Both of these advantages can be realized if the EFL of the lens is short enough to provide angular coverage of at least sixty degrees. In such systems, a very small package can be achieved utilizing only one mirror. Also, by designing a lens of decreased focal length, for example, less than eighty-five millimeters for a five inch diagonal CRT, the lens element diameters are reduced, further decreasing manufacturing costs. The projection lenses as exemplified by the above-identified patents had considerably less angular coverage, typically being less than fifty degrees, and the field flattening element would have considerably less power. This means that in a projection lens of wider field angle more aberrations may be introduced by the field flattener, which must be corrected elsewhere. Furthermore, the angle of off-axis rays passing through the second lens lens unit is also increased, so that those aberrations are likewise increased.
The present design eliminates these problems by a new configuration of the second positive lens unit.